


you may blame aphrodite;

by thehandsingsweapon



Series: in a future time; [4]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Author Yuuri, M/M, classics references abound again, historian victor, lgbtq+ people in history: victor nikiforov's personal soapbox, queen victoria has been dead for one hundred slutty years, the greek summer of pining becomes the english fall of gay disasters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-05-28 09:04:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19390903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: After a mythical summer on the coast of Thessaly, Greece, brings Yuuri Katsuki into Victor's life, it's up to Victor to find a way to keep him. The Midas touch which allowed him to so swiftly sail through his research while a student is proving a burden now; even Yuuri sometimes seems to think there's nothing he can't turn into gold.A story about how two people who've put each other on a pedestal become mortal again, and in so doing, find the sort of love that the gods used to inscribe into the stars.note: this follows the events ofin a future time;





	1. cycnus

**Author's Note:**

> “You may 
> 
> blame Aphrodite 
> 
> soft as she is 
> 
> she has almost 
> 
> killed me with 
> 
> love for that boy” 
> 
> \- Sappho

Victor Nikiforov meets Okukawa Minako at 8:47 am, standing in his underwear in her kitchen while frying eggs and putting the finishing touches on a batch of bliny. “So you’re Victor, then,” she says, this woman who has suddenly appeared in her own home. Of all of the things he’d expected whenever Yuuri spoke about his godmother, Victor had not anticipated this ageless woman with a calculating look, evidently completely unphased by the almost-naked stranger standing in the middle of her house. In the span of no more than a few seconds, she lacerates him with an all-seeing stare, and then moves into the kitchen to fetch the honey from one of the upper cabinets near the stove.

Immediately, Victor, normally immune to shame, feels self-conscious about the prominent hickeys he’s sporting: a fading one somewhere on his throat from a few days before, a smattering of marks along the insides of his thighs, and a sharp, mottled bruise just along his hipbone in the shape of Yuuri Katsuki’s teeth. His pale skin mottles so readily under Yuuri’s mouth, like fruit ready for the harvest, and Victor’s never met anyone he’d more readily be consumed by. He begins to contemplate how, exactly, he’d even begin to apologize for the sins he’s committed in the past week in this woman’s swimming pool, stuttering his way through a hello. “Y-yes,” he croaks, finding English slow to respond to his commands. “You, uh … you must be Minako.”

“I see why you got him writing again, at least,” replies Minako, with a mean smile and a low whistle between her teeth, the sort that implies that Victor’s been doing a whole lot more than that. He feels his nose heat up, and turns his attention back to the pan before the eggs have a chance to burn. It’s only been a few days, but he’s already learned that Yuuri usually tries to stay in bed, even if the sunlight runs rampant in his room at the first sign of dawn. Victor’s the opposite, always early to rise, and this morning he’d watched the sunlight play over Yuuri’s face and then thought _I’ll make him breakfast._ It’s been years since he cooked for anyone, and certainly not mimicking his mother’s recipe for pancakes, but Yuuri’s put something soft into his chest, something that gives Victor’s hands a mind of their own and which sometimes makes him stir-crazy with affection. “Throw two more eggs on, Adonis, and I’ll forgive you for not bothering to at least put a shirt and some pants on before you made use of my kitchen.”

Victor does, and then opens his idiot mouth a second later, ever and always the show-off. “The story of Adonis is pretty fu— screwed up,” he corrects gently. Then again, what myth isn’t? Every story is permeated by ichor and gold. 

“What story isn’t?” Hums Minako, and Victor blinks, then closes his mouth. Yuuri would’ve indulged him, fingers traipsing over the freckles on Victor’s shoulderblades, dug another story out of the recesses of Victor’s body, but Yuuri is asleep. _What story isn’t,_ he thinks. His is. Hers too, probably. He stares at her again for a moment, helpless, holding the frying pan, and only then does Minako laugh, eyes crinkled with mischief. “Go put some bloody pants on and wake up your not-boyfriend,” she teases.

“Not-boyfriend?” Victor echoes.

“He used to tell me you weren’t going on dates,” Minako crows. Her gleeful mischief could give Yakov’s righteous fury a run for its money. “Denial runs strong with that one.” 

It’s a warning that Victor misses, shaking his head and chuckling his discomfort away as he flees back upstairs to the bedroom, scrambling into yesterday’s pants and the shirt left to grow wrinkles on the floor, forgotten because he’d had better things to think about with Yuuri in his arms.

Summer, which had begun so slowly, back on staff with Yakov like he suddenly an undergraduate again, ends much too rapidly after that: Victor blinks and he and Yuuri are out having dinner one last time before Yuuri is set to return to London for what Victor is certain will be his final semester, once he polishes up this latest suite of poems under the watchful eye of his new instructor. Victor has tried not to think about the fact that at least Yuuri has a path forward: he’ll go home, and probably publish, and then he’ll fall into the arms of a top-tier school hungry for a poet-laureate on their staff. Victor, on the other hand, is still struggling to get universities and museums to return his calls; the most prestigious ones are chaired by men and women who are the inheritors of the very sins he devoted an entire book to describing, and he’s not sure he wants to return to Russia, where he’ll be too popular and well-known to impede, but not immune to censorship either. _You’ll find something before I do,_ Yuuri tells him, stubbornly. _You’re a genius._

Victor doesn’t say it, but he thinks that may be part of the problem. _Genius_ sounds like a compliment on its face, but it has a problematic history involving people usually being disliked while alive and then recognized after their deaths. Instead he smiles, though Yuuri studies him thoughtfully as he does it, and Victor briefly worries that Yuuri can see the difference. “You’re probably right,” he says, amenably, and then wiggles his eyebrows towards the menu on the table. “Dessert?”

The real treat is later, back in Yuuri’s room in the dark, kissing sweetly and slowly. Victor wasn’t about to risk Plisetsky banging on the walls in at the house Yakov and crew have rented. 

“Minako might hear,” Yuuri whispers, as Victor’s hands tease along the edge of his boxers. Victor is making maps of him still, even now; Yuuri is the most interesting site he’s ever been privileged enough to explore, full of nuances and subtleties that Victor’s not sure he’ll ever learn completely.

“Then try to be quiet,” Victor teases with a wink. He rolls Yuuri onto his back and sits back on his own heels, punctuating his words with a series of slow, wet kisses down Yuuri’s sternum, nibbling at his chest, smirking against the just-barely-there impression of his abdominal muscles underneath the deceptively soft slope of his stomach. After Yuuri’s flight in the morning, he will feel bereft, as moody as he’d been at the start of the summer when all of his other job prospects fell through. He refuses to dwell on it now, grinning in the moonlight. “I want to give you a going away present.”

He wants Yuuri’s fingers in his hair and Yuuri’s taste on his mouth. Wants to hear his name when it falls of Yuuri’s lips, at first in a sigh and then in a litany, a prayer to the long-forgotten gods Yuuri’s spent so much time writing about. Victor’s seen the first drafts, but thinks Yuuri’s got the story backwards. He’s the one who feels mortal, like this, hiding his rabbit-heartbeat and a thousand insecurities about his future with a winning smile and layer upon layer of stories. Yuuri is artlessly, almost carelessly beautiful, and utterly unaware of it, like some demigod squirreled away in the mortal plane for Victor to chance upon at a summer festival.

Victor is not sure how to tell him this; the words barely come in Russian, much less in English. But he can try to show him, worshipping between Yuuri’s legs until Yuuri’s back bows, the arch of it and the expression on his face vying to each be the most exquisite thing Victor’s ever seen.

Still, he says _Victor_ like it’s Victor who’s the revelation. Later, as they curl together to finally fall asleep, Victor finally murmurs: “you’re beautiful, you know that?”

“Mm,” Yuuri mumbles into Victor’s collarbone. He presses a chaste kiss there. “Go to sleep.”

\- - - 

_Curriculum Vitae  
_ **Victor A. Nikiforov, Ph.D**

**Professional Profile**

  * Historian, author, researcher, and speaker specializing in ancient history, with concentrations in classical antiquity and a particular focus on the forgotten narratives of LGBTQ+ peoples across time, place, and cultures.
  * Author, _Beloved._ Cambridge University Press, 2017. Received 4* reviews from renown publications, including _The Guardian_ and _The Atlantic:_ “Dr. Nikiforov makes no secret of his goals in book’s introduction: he examines with a critical eye the way bias and censorship have shaped the institutions of archaeology and anthropology over time. He is particularly concerned with the treatment of individuals in history whom he says would currently be included within the broad church of the LGBTQ community, whose lost narratives he seeks to restore. In the case of the latter, he makes compelling cases about figures widely and not-so-widely known; in the case of the former, he unflinchingly accuses the establishment of, at its best, misleading the public, and at its worst, being the source of lasting harm. Queer erasure from ancient narratives, Nikiforov argues, has made it easy to pretend that heteronormativity is the natural state of the human race. In the last chapter of the book, both its most fantastical and its most poignant, he examines what a world without this broad misconception might have looked like: from amended and corrected Bible translations to a radically diminished landscape of hate groups. The book has strongly divided historians, but one thing’s for sure: it’s gotten everyone talking.” 
  * Co-Founder, LGBTQ+ Tours at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge: _exploring the nature of identity and expression across time, place, and culture within the Cambridge collections._
  * Graduated with honors, Cambridge University, ENS Paris, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University.
  * Teacher, Byzantine Seminar, Summer 2016, Cambridge. Teacher’s Assistant for various courses in Classics and Antiquities. Average course rating of 3.82/4; references available upon request.
  * Languages: Russian, English, French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> incidentally, the tours I mentioned in Victor's CV are a real thing, and I was delighted to see they've thrown shade at the sleeping hermaphroditus that Victor complains about in his prologue chapter of IAFT: 
> 
> <https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/things-to-do/things-to-do-1/lgbtq-tours>  
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Hermaphroditus>
> 
> &edit, I wrote more about that here: <https://handsingsweapon.tumblr.com/post/185903653976/you-may-blame-aphrodite>


	2. thamyris

“So you’re all settled in, huh?” It’s only habit that keeps Victor’s voice level and casual from where he’s perched on a log, overlooking the curve of the rockier end of the local beach. The rest of Yakov’s team has already retired back to town for the night, but here he is, earbuds in, studying the sea, trying not to admit just how much he hates not being able to see the corner of Yuuri’s eyes crinkle when he’s holding back a laugh. Even the kid — Plisetsky — thinks he’s ridiculous. _It hasn’t even been a week, you fucking idiot. How long are you going to sulk for?_

“Yeah,” Yuuri confirms. Victor hears the rustle of cabinets in the background, the clink of a mug. _He’s making tea,_ he thinks, fondly. These are the sounds of a dream they stole for a few weeks in Minako’s home, of a momentarily shared domesticity that’s been swiftly shattered as reality sets in. “It’s a little weird,” he admits. “Seeing all the undergraduates move in again.”

“Have you spoken to your advisor?”

“I gave him the drafts,” Yuuri murmurs. Victor resists the urge to sigh: he’d suggested at one point that Yuuri email them in ahead of the semester to get a jump start, and Yuuri had equivocated and protested through a round of edits that Victor’s almost certain he put off until his flight back to England. Perhaps not even then. Victor had dropped him off at the airport, smiling and waving his way through his farewells until it’d been time to head to work. Standing at the edge of the dock, he’d needed to stop and pinch the bridge of his nose until the tell-tale prickle in his eyes subsided, and then he’d pulled out a big pair of aviator sunglasses and taken out his feelings on Yuri Plisetsky’s assignments, doing inventory on the fragments they’ve extracted from the wreck. “He promised he’d give me feedback next week,” placates Yuuri, in what must be Victor’s too-long silence. “… What if he doesn’t like them?”

“He’ll like them,” Victor reassures him.

“You like them because they’re about you,” mutters Yuuri. Victor has learned that Yuuri possesses in his pinky more talent than most people have in their entire body. In all of the ancient myths, such people are punished by the gods, so naturally Yuuri also possesses enough disbelief and anxiety for a small town, and even then the effect is only _almost_ crippling. It’s another one of those subtly remarkable things about him: his own ability to survive being at war with himself.

“I like them because you wrote them,” Victor corrects gently. He looks out over the water again, but the tide has lost its allure. Perhaps it’s the cloudy night, threatening an overnight rain, but he no longer sees the sapphire shades of the sea or the diamonds that glitter on the surface as the waves come in. He feels muted, discontent, antsy in a way that hard past experiences have taught him are dangerous. And he’s applied to three more fellowships. Two nights ago, he’d gone to Yakov’s office and convinced the old man to dig out his vodka, which hadn’t helped as much as Victor’d hoped: _at this rate I’ll be teaching high school history,_ he’d admitted, in one particularly dour moment, not that Victor has anything against teachers. It’s just that he dreams of being able to course-correct centuries of terrible legacy. _Could be worse,_ Yakov muttered, which Victor supposed was true but didn’t help.

He needs to not think about this right now, letting precious minutes drift by while he sits around feeling sorry for himself. “What’s your favorite piece of art?”

“The Sleeping Hermaphroditus.”

 _“Yuuri!”_ Victor protests, though the sound of Yuuri’s answering laugh on the line nearly makes him smile in spite of it all. The Sleeping Hermaphroditus and its many copies, Yuuri knows, had been the subject of one of Victor’s first major papers as an undergraduate. He and his professor in Moscow had so profoundly disagreed on the subject that now he can hardly stand to think about it. “So mean to me,” he whines.

“I like the symbolists and the decadents,” Yuuri admits, with the smile still in his voice. _Moreau,_ Victor thinks, racking his brain for connections. Then he remembers who originally established the aesthetic and smiles his first real smile. _Rimbaud. Verlaine._ Poets. Of course. And Beardsley, drawing erotic and scandalous pictures, which might explain a thing or two about some of Yuuri’s particularly devious and sensuous bedroom habits. Suddenly Victor wants to know what books he’d find in Yuuri’s flat, which ones have abused spines and dog-eared corners. They could have exchanged books with each other before Yuuri left, whatever they each brought for summer reading, but he never thought about it and then they simply ran out of the time. “Maybe _Death and the Grave Digger,”_ Yuuri adds with a contemplative hum. _“_ Why? What’s yours?”

_“Eros deute m o’lusimeles donei,  
_ _glukupikron amaxanon orpeton.”_

“Victor,” Yuuri half-warns, half-questions, and so Victor dutifully recites one of the more striking translations:

“That impossible predator,  
Eros, the Limb-Loosener,  
bitter-sweetly and afresh  
savages my flesh.”

“Sappho,” says Yuuri, immediately. Victor smiles. _The second time we met._ “That’s a poem.”

“So?” Victor asks. _Are poets not artists, too?_ “Don’t you think if I asked you to tell me what it is you like about _Death and the Grave Digger_ that I’d learn something about you in the process?”

“You mean in the unacademic sense, like personally?”

“In any sense.” Victor replies. He realizes with a start that he’s only a block or two away from home; at some point he’d turned his back on the sea and begun to just walk, retracing cobblestone streets that he recalls driving Yuuri through during a gentle rain. Victor supposes it doesn’t count as a first date, officially that might’ve been the trip to Delphi or just after. Funny, the way he knows exactly when Yuuri collided with his life, drunk and spectacular, but everything after has been a soft slide into this feeling he doesn’t want to lose, like the easy drift of a falling feather. “ _Beloved_ is also an autobiography,” he says. Everything anyone has ever created says something about them, he thinks. In that way, Yuuri has also been writing a diary. “ _That_ is why I like your poems.”

On the other side of the phone, Yuuri’s silence stretches almost too long. “You’re a crazy person,” he deflects. It’s truer than he knows, this standard defense.

“You can’t think I’m crazy _and_ brilliant,” Victor protests, digging in his pocket for the housekey. He lets himself in, glancing around the flat, and determines that he’s been abandoned by the rest of the crew for dinner.

“I can,” Yuuri retorts swiftly. _“Crazy like a fox.”_ Then he laughs and explains that’s the sort of thing one of his old roommates used to say, which also serves as a change in subject which Victor’s more than willing to go along with long enough to rummage for leftovers and retire to his room. In the process, he tells Yuuri that he was an overworked, perfectionist undergraduate and that he didn’t really get into trouble until he did his master’s degree in Paris. He has a Swiss-Italian post-graduate to thank for that. Christophe’s angelic face and round glasses belied a lifestyle that might’ve given Oscar Wilde cause for envy. “… It’s still a little hard to believe, you know,” Yuuri murmurs, after Victor’s plugged his phone into the charger to spare its protesting battery, and then stretched out on his bed.

“What is?”

“You, I guess.” Yuuri says. “Me talking to you about the time someone got you so drunk in Paris that you forgot you spoke French. You liking me enough to tolerate it —”

“Yuuri.” Victor rolls onto his side, and sends a pointed look towards his phone. He opens and closes his mouth, searching for any word in each of his six languages that will convey the size and shape of just how much he _likes_ Yuuri and then winds up exhaling on a ‘tch.’ He shouldn’t lecture, he knows, and so he teases, instead. “I seem to remember doing a lot more than just _tolerate_ you. I thought my _interest_ was pretty marked …” Now that he’s on this train of thought there’s very little stopping it; Victor grins to himself and rolls back over on his back, idly sweeping a hand down his shirt while he ponders what exactly it was he’d liked best: drizzling kisses over Yuuri’s throat, or down the bumps of his spine; whether it was Yuuri’s ankles that drove him mad, or his runner’s thighs, thick and strong, or the perfect swell of his ass…

“Victor.”

“I could prove it to you again, if you want,” Victor hums, shameless. He grins when he hears Yuuri’s sharp inhale on the other side of the phone. Victor’s reasonably sure that he’s still got a bottle of lube stashed somewhere in his nightstand, leftovers of a time before he’d ever started spending nights at the villa up on the hill. Little more than a secret tucked away at the bottom of his luggage when he’d been reasonably sure he’d spend his entire summer with a crew of angry Russian historians, and get laid approximately zero times in the process. Then along came Yuuri, and Victor’d never been so glad to be wrong. “Tell you all the ways I still want you.”

“We — you — I — _not right now,”_ Yuuri stammers suddenly.

Victor immediately tries to rein in the slap of rejection. “Oh,” he asks idly. And then, still teasing: “So later?”

“I don’t — look, I’ve never —”

Victor kicks himself for the obvious edge that’s leapt into Yuuri’s voice, tinged with the panic he absolutely hates. _Idiot,_ he thinks to himself. _You should’ve talked to him about this before he left …_ “Yuuri, look, it’s —” _it’s okay,_ he means to say. _It’s not something we have to do, we can figure it out —_

“I need to get started on reviewing the classes I’m TA’ing this semester,” Yuuri interrupts, “and it’s late. Let’s talk again later this week?”

Only after he rushes Victor through a goodnight does Victor think _what a bullshit excuse._

“Trouble in paradise?” Plisetsky sneers later, when he catches Victor sneaking into the kitchen in his pajamas to chase his ibuprofen down with a shot before bed. _That won’t help you sleep,_ he hears, in a long-forgotten therapist’s voice. But Paris is a long way behind him now, and the little apothecary in town isn’t going to just hand him an anti-depressant because he’s realized his life is unraveling.

“Fuck off,” snaps Victor. And that shuts the kid up. _Blessed silence,_ he thinks to himself later, when the whole house is quiet, when he’s staring at the ceiling in the dark. Except he doesn’t really mean it. He’d give anything to be listening to the rise and fall of Yuuri’s breath, or the subtle rustle of the sheets.

On his nightstand his phone blinks with incoming texts:

> **Yuuri** ♥: im sorry  
>  **Yuuri** ♥: i don’t know what i’m doing and i’m nervous and stupid and a trainwreck most of the time and you’re just  
>  **Yuuri** ♥: perfect, i guess

Victor snorts. _If only he knew,_ he thinks, and that’s when it hits him. _Oh._

_He doesn’t._

_\- - -_

**For:** Nikiforov, Victor A.  
**Date:** 14/11/2012  
**Rx:**

Sertraline (Zoloft) 50mg daily, by mouth  
Trazodone, 50mg, once daily as needed for sleep

 **Prescribing Physician:** Dr. Louis Fournier, ENS Paris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to dommi for some advice for this chapter's artifact! [i did the needful with tumblr re: symbolists and decadents](https://handsingsweapon.tumblr.com/post/186203641076/you-may-blame-aphrodite-ch2-thamyris), if you're curious.
> 
> the diary concept victor references is also a bit of a lean on a line from a chuck palahniuk book, _diary_ , which i've never read because i'm not a fan but the concept stuck in my head: 
> 
> “your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.”
> 
> PS: I think the Sappho translation used here that Victor quotes is by Anne Carson but I'm not 100% sure. I'm in the process of moving and usually I use [this](https://www.amazon.com/If-Not-Winter-Fragments-Sappho/dp/0375724516) as my source, but it's packed up with the rest of my books currently in storage!


End file.
